MEDIA: ADVERTISING; The Grandchildren of 'The Golden Girls'

By Julie Bosman

Published: November 8, 2005

THE Lifetime cable channel, best known for appealing to middle-age women with weepy fare like ''Murder in the Hamptons'' and the biography series ''Intimate Portrait,'' has found an unorthodox way to tap into the youth market.

Beginning this week, it will use the success of one of its syndicated comedies, ''The Golden Girls,'' to create an elaborate wireless and online promotional campaign timed to coincide with the show's 20th anniversary. While a show centered on the lives of four Miami retirees may seem to be an unusual magnet for 18-to-34-year-old viewers, Lifetime executives say the sitcom is increasingly popular with that age group.

After nearly 200,000 people registered for a ''Golden Girls'' online newsletter, the network realized that the fan base was skewing younger, said Lisa Black, vice president of business and marketing development at Lifetime. A large portion of the respondents were in high school or college and visited the Web site, www.lifetimetv.com, with surprising regularity, she said.

''We thought based on who the fans are, and the fact that they're technologically savvy, to really leverage the desire they have for any new content with these ladies,'' Ms. Black said. ''We really designed it with our fan base in mind.''

Lifetime created a campaign heavy on wireless and online elements. Even though the seven-year network run of ''The Golden Girls,'' which began in 1985, was a period when only early adopters had cellphones, the promotion highlights the wireless capability of the show's current syndicated audience. Fans can download ring tones of the show's theme song, ''Thank You for Being a Friend,'' along with cellphone wallpaper and ''Golden Girls''-themed ringbacks, the customized tunes that callers hear in place of standard rings when making a call.

The campaign also allows fans to download voice mail greetings and voice tones recorded by the show's stars.

Lifetime is even borrowing tricks from one of its competitors, MTV. A Web site feature introduced a week ago is similar to MTV's ''Overdrive,'' the Internet video channel that offers added content for reality programs like ''Laguna Beach.'' Lifetime's version, called the ''Lifetime Video Lounge,'' features ''Golden Girls'' clips and a series of testimonial vignettes from fans of the show. On Friday, Lifetime will run an encore presentation of ''The Golden Girls Reunion,'' which was its highest-rated special to date.

''Golden Girls,'' which started in syndication on Lifetime in 1997, currently runs an average of five times a day on the channel, and more than 16 million people watch the show during any given week, said Gary Morgenstein, a Lifetime spokesman.

''Within the first couple of years, it really took off,'' Mr. Morgenstein said. ''It's a phenomenon and there's no other way to describe it.''

Tim Brooks, the executive vice president for research at Lifetime and co-author with Earle Marsh of ''The Complete Directory to Prime-Time Network and Cable TV Shows,'' said the show owed its appeal to a younger audience partly to the youthful personalities of its four main characters, played by Bea Arthur, Betty White, Rue McClanahan and Estelle Getty.

''On the face of it, a show about three retired women and one of their mothers living in Miami hardly seems like the kind of thing young America would take to,'' Mr. Brooks said. ''But the three women were all acting like they were teenagers in some way. They all dated, they all talked about sex, they didn't care about what people thought about them. Those are all values that younger people share.'' (Noting a familiar formula, Lifetime has called the series the original ''Sex and the City.'')

In addition, audiences are often fond of television shows that they watched in their early teens, said Tom Hill, the creative director for Nick at Nite and TV Land.

''You basically connect to shows that are meaningful to you and will be nostalgic to you for the rest of your life,'' Mr. Hill said.

Nick at Nite, the evening and overnight programming block of the Nickelodeon network, has shifted to other favorite shows of the 1980's -- including ''The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,'' ''Murphy Brown'' and ''The Cosby Show'' -- from shows of the 1960's and 1970's. The TV Land channel, part of Nickelodeon, runs 24-hour programming of classic shows like ''The Dick Van Dyke Show,'' ''Bonanza'' and ''All in the Family.''

On Friday, the network will run an 11-hour marathon of ''The Golden Girls,'' interspersed with a roundtable discussion with the comedians Mo Rocca and Judy Gold. Mr. Rocca said young people who loved the show thought of the characters as ''idealized grandmothers.''

''The portrayal of these women as fun, loving, sexy, energetic oldsters is kind of a wonderful escapist fantasy of the realities of assisted living,'' Mr. Rocca said.

Photo: ''The Golden Girls'' is the basis of a new ad campaign by the Lifetime cable channel.